The CCB said that the removal of OtherOS crippled console features that were present at the time of purchase, and agreed that consumers should be compensated. It recommended that the manufacturer and seller of the console pay €100 jointly to compensate the man.

Unfortunately, it appears that the Consumer Complaints Board has no enforcement ability... but that its rulings are frequently used by courts in dealing with disputes. Thus, it seems that Finnish PS3 owners might want to see if they can start some sort of legal action to get their €100 back from Sony for taking away a key feature that was used in marketing the PS3.

from the uusi-suomi dept

Reader Mimu Bunnylin points us to an interesting "trademark" battle coming out of Finland, where the Green political party kicked off their latest political campaign with a new slogan: "New Finland" (apparently Uusi Suomi in Finnish). Seems pretty generic, right? Well, apparently for a long time there was a newspaper in Finland that went by that name, and while it went out of business in 1991, in 2007 it was revived as an online only publication. While the editor of that publication didn't see anything wrong with the Green Party slogan, the publisher apparently went ballistic (Google translation from the original Finnish). He called (a different) Finnish newspaper from his vacation to complain about what the Green Party had done:

"This is intolerable, damn it! It is shocking that the Greens think they can demean the name of New Finland without contacting me!"

According to Bunnylin, the publisher also said:

"If due reparations are not agreed on, Green voters can vote for the Pirate Party, who think no one should pay for using other people's rights."

Of course, it seems that's what it really comes down to: "due reparations." Perhaps the publisher saw an opportunity to try to get some cash out of this. However, it does raise questions about whether or not such a generic and descriptive phrase like "New Finland" can really be trademarked in the first place.

"We will have a policy where operators will send letters to illegal file-sharers but we are not planning on cutting off access."

According to the music industry, of course, this makes the Finnish government radical extremists. How dare they want to make sure everyone has broadband connectivity and the ability to communicate freely. How could that possibly be more important than one industry's increasingly obsolete business model?

from the finally dept

Different countries have taken different approaches to the legality of "open WiFi." We've often heard about police going around and trying to shut down open WiFi networks, but that seemed silly: what if you actually wanted to offer open WiFi? Back in 2005, Finland freaked out about the concept of open WiFi, blaming open WiFi for the following scam:

The Helsinki branch of financing firm GE Money apparently was scammed recently. Here's how it worked: (1) the company's own head of data security (2) stole banking software from the company after which he (3) took confidential users passwords for its bank accounts. He then (4) stole money from GE Money's accounts by transferring it to a (5) secret account he had set up months earlier. Oh yeah, he did this last bit (6) via an open WiFi connection.

All those other things? No big deal. The problem here, according to many in Finland, was the open WiFi, the use of which was later outlawed (apparently via case law) (Updated to clarify that it was the use of open WiFi that was made illegal, not setting up open WiFi).

Thankfully, it looks like regulators there have now realized this was a total overreaction. Slashdot points us to the news that the Finish Justice Ministry is preparing to legalize the use of open WiFi (Google translation from the original Finnish) after realizing that open WiFi is both widely used and incredibly useful.

Finally, a side note, because this has come up before from commenters who think that I'm being inconsistent: supporting open WiFi does not mean that you support individuals not protecting themselves when using the open WiFi. In past threads, it was suggested that supporting open WiFi while pointing out how silly it is for people to complain about their own poor security habits was in disagreement. It is entirely reasonable and consistent to support open WiFi (at the access point level) while suggesting that individuals (at the user level) encrypt their own data. In fact, that's quite a useful situation: more open WiFi, but security at the user level, is really a situation that works best for everyone.

from the yeah,-that'll-work dept

If you want to see the ultimate in the "entitlement" mentality of the old record labels, check out this report of a Finnish indie label posted an angry rant to its website threatening that it won't sign any new artists until the government somehow stops piracy. Good luck with that plan. Let's see if anyone actually cares. You basically have a business, that refuses to adapt, insisting that it will now go out of business unless the government somehow does the impossible and stops market forces from doing what they do. The proper response is to just let the label go out of business. If it can't adapt, then it should die. Simple as that.

What's really unfortunate, of course, is that I just got back from Norway a couple months ago, and was so impressed with the optimism and enthusiasm from various folks in the music industry around the Nordic countries (including quite a few from Finland). Apparently, the folks from Lion Music didn't attend that event.

from the my-rights-are-being-trampled dept

While the US is still struggling to figure out how to define broadband and where it's even available, Finland has decided that 1Mb broadband access should now be considered a legal right, with plans to boost that to 100Mb by the end of 2015. There do appear to be some exceptions for remote households, but if I were living in Finland right now, instead of the heart of Silicon Valley, my "legal rights" would be denied. While I'm not sure it makes sense to define broadband as a legal right, it's yet another reminder of how far behind the US appears to be on broadband deployments.

"We are absolutely against the idea that any political party can give their support to the idea of free use of protected content."

Apparently freedom of political expression isn't high on the list of things the old recording industry likes. I have no problem with the IFPI saying that they disagree with the reasons for The Pirate Party's platform, but that's not what's being said here. The IFPI is claiming that no political party should be allowed to support such positions. Of course, the quote also totally misunderstands the party's position, but that's not much of a surprise.

from the that-seems-a-bit-more-reasonable dept

With all of the discussion over the size of the awards in the Jammie Thomas and Joel Tenenbaum rulings, it appears that the courts over in Finland are a bit more reasonable. An appeals court has upheld a ruling against a guy who was found guilty of sharing 150 albums online, and the court has ordered him to pay 3,000 euros. I'm trying to figure out how 24 songs = $1.92 million here in the US, but 150 albums and 1,850 songs = 3,000 euros (a little over $4,000). Which one seems more aligned with the actual action?

from the P2P-is-not-Pirate2Pirate dept

A bunch of folks have sent in this story about a copyright lobbying group in Finland that is threatening to sue a website that helps people rent textbooks, oddly calling it "The Pirate Bay for textbooks." That makes no sense if you understand what the site actually does. It's not hosting ebooks. It's literally connecting people who own textbooks to others, so they can rent their physical textbooks. It's difficult to see how that could be considered copyright infringement at all, let alone anything similar to The Pirate Bay. But, in this day and age, where the copyright lobbyists see almost anything as infringement, perhaps it's no surprise they'd freak out about this as well.

from the some-good-news dept

Back in February, we found it disturbing that Finland was allowing the results of an election to stand, despite the fact that at least 2% of the votes had gone missing due to e-voting glitches. However, it looks like some sense of sanity has been restored as a higher court has now rejected the election results and ordered a new election. One hopes that the new election won't involve similarly screwed up e-voting machines. Speaking of which... in a separate article, we find yet another story of e-voting machines that were "mis-calibrated" in such a way that made it difficult to impossible for people to vote for candidates of their choice. At some point, given all of these problems with e-voting machines, you have to ask why elections officials still rely on them.